Sunday, February 28, 2010

I'm sure you've run into this situation at least once where you have a huge demand, but can't seem to hold onto a supply to match it. This has been happening off and on with my sever in several different markets from time to time. There will be a serious drought followed with a significant price spike, which will also have an effect on their primary and/or their secondary markets. This has been happening a lot lately with enchanting mats or all levels. Everything from greater cosmics, abyss crystals, brilliant shards, and even dream shards have been falling off the edge of the earth it seems. I mean, how can there NOT be a supply of dream shards? In addition to this, there have been rare and epic gems taking their turns of obscurity as well and especially borean leather.

So what is one to do when such a thing happens? You can only raise your thresholds so much before it's no longer worth it. You can go to trade chat sure, but that takes a good amount of time and annoyance with "lololol harry poter ands teh ANAL [item link]!" The option to leave that market is always there, but nobody ever wants to do that since lost time is lost money. Also on the note of raising yourthreshold, there can come a point where the crafted item is selling for a significant amount less than the materials cost at that time. If this happens don't raise it up but sell the raw materials if the pricing gap is big enough. Here's a recent example of mine.

The weapon enchant exceptional agility requires 4 eternal airs and 4 dream shards to craft. I pay 15g for the eternals and 5g for the shards plus the weapon vellum, so that means that each of these scrolls costs me 80g to make at these prices. So I won't be selling it for any less than at least 100g for it to be worth the effort and time. Now looking at the current AH prices shards are at 8g and the eternals are up to 30g making that old price not such a good deal for me. However there's still a bunch of the scrolls up for as low as 130g each. Well I need the shards still since I'm running out, and I'm also low on the eternals.

So what should I do? I should sell off the eternals at a hefty profit then buy out the cheap scrolls and flip them for a much better price. Because when it comes to eternals and very cheap shards, most people will only buy when they need more or only when they're extra cheap. For me, eternal airs at a decent price are hard to come by, so I'll buy a ton when the price is good and only resell when the price is insanely high. This means that if I'm out of materials, then so is the competition. And since we both have the same access to the same supply (minus farming, ugh) unless one of us gets lucky and finds a boat load for super cheap we're both sold out. Then it becomes a game of who has more of what left over before the drought and price spikes.

I've been doing the same thing with a few epic gems and scarlet rubys. The supply is running out and the cut gems are the same price still so I'll buy out a bunch and resell them for as much of a profit as I would have gotten at normal cut and sell prices.

You can also see this in a larger scale when the price of infinite dust goes up. Once it hits the 2g each mark, you'll see all the cheap common gems and eternal earths disappear to be replaced with the prices tripled. That's because peopel are making the JC rings to DE for 2-3 dust and some lesser cosmics. That's one thing though that you can always have a huge stock of. Right now eternal earths are at a ludicrous 20g price when 2 days ago they were 5g. I saw this coming and bought up every last one there was along with the common gems. Now everybody that wants dust has to pay through the nose for it while I still have them for a solid price. Sure I could sell the dust for a small profit, but using it for scrolls would be an even greater profit due to the price I got them all for.

That is not me suggesting you pay the high price regardless because you can still make a profit, but make a judgment call on if the price difference between the raw mats, what you have left, and the crafted product. If the profit margins are high enough for you then keep doing what you've been doing, otherwise you should consider flipping or just selling off the raw materials.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Over the course of this last week I've been coming up with a lot of different ideas to post in the blog. They're mostly very short and fit more into an "oh by the way..." than they would fit into an actual post. So today I'm going to go ahead and just post them all in no particular format or order. Simply just a "hey here's a handful of things on my mind you may or may not find interesting or useful." Enjoy.

-I've now decided to start buying frozen orbs and I'm paying 15g each. I'm doing this because I buy a eternal air, life, and shadow for that price and I expect their prices to largely remain the same. If they don't, I can promise that frost lotus will still be worth more than 15g even with the trade ins and drop rate increase.

-I'm also doing battle grounds since on the ptr you can trade a single mark from any for 2k honor. Though I highly highly doubt this will go live as with full marks you can have enough tokens to get 1.2 million honor. That turns into 120 epic gems or all the pvp gear you want from every arena season from now until the END of cataclysm.

-There is a definite 12 hour cycle of sell times for the AH. It moves like clockwork each and every day at 11am server and 11pm server. It's so consistent that you can set your watch on it. As soon as you start selling a lot of stuff you know that it's either almost noon or almost midnight. I find that it generally lasts for 1-2 hours before it fades off.

-People who get angry at you for undercutting you won't be posting their goods for very long. Weather it be friends, competition, or guildies it doesn't matter. When somebody gets upset over that, I can't help but just outright laugh at them. I mean what did you think, that I would just hand you the entire market? A week later they'll have already stopped and likely won't be a bother for a while.

-A question for all the druids, hunters and shamans out there. Do you people even use glyphs? I mean really, I almost never sell a glyph for any of those classes even a bottom of the barrel 3g glyph. It might be because the glyphs for those classes aren't as obvious or intuitive as others. It's a lot easier for a retard that never heard of EJ to see something that says "5% crit to fireball" and know that's useful than to see "reduce the cool down of [skill] by 1 second" and know if that's any good at all. It would definitely explain why some of the most useless glyphs get sold for 30g.

-Denial of service still works for late night gem cuts or obscure enchants, which is always fun and amusing. It might not happen often, but it is so hysterical when it does that the loss of a potential tip is completely worth it. A while ago I got the +22 int to weapon enchant from thorium brotherhood rep. I sell the scrolls of it for 450g (about 300g profit) and just recently saw somebody looking for it. They were offering I think 50g tip for it, but I was off in TB and didn't bother trying. They waited about 10 minutes, bought my scroll for 450g, posted the mats for half market price, then I bought the mats and listed another scroll for 450. Sold that scroll the next day which made this even more gratifying.

-Intentional price spikes. You've likely had the chance to do this before when you go to buy say abyss crystals and there's none on AH. You consider posting a handful for like 80g or some other silly high price. This is usually a bad idea since it could take a while for the prices to go down to your buying range. If you use a certain material, it's wise to leave the market as is because it's far too easy to shoot yourself in the foot without a totally massive stockpile. But if you do have a week or so of supply, you can mess with your competitors something fierce.

-Post a large assortment of things in any market that you can. While you will surely be undercut on many things, more likely your competition won't be crafting X of every gem or X number of every useful enchanting scroll. If you've been taking my advice and stockpiling mats, you'll be able to regularly post everything that sells for a profit and your competition will only be effecting a portion of your market rather than the entire thing. This mostly applies only to epic gems and weapon enchanting scrolls due to the high material cost. Because you could spend several thousand gold to make a full stock of weapon enchants or cut one of each cardinal ruby, a lot of people will stick with the handful they craft when possible. This casual seller usually won't branch out as they don't have the inventory or financial backing for it. Since you like to stockpile, and I know you do, you don't have to worry about being stuck there too.

Friday, February 26, 2010

When I go to trade to buy stuff, I always expect people to comment on my prices and I'm sure you've noticed it too. Usually along the lines of 'wtb abyss crystals for [market-X] pst' and responses like 'lolol you no get dem for dat price nuubz!' Or sarcastic comments of ' lulz u wtb cheap so u can make moar golds?' Well as a matter of fact, yes you moron. Taking a page from Gevlon's book, these people are the M&S (morons and slackers), the fools that make the game much less fun for us. I mean god forbid I use my professions to make money and not spend two hours doing 25 dailys and another 4 hours farming saronite in ice crown.

These people have no concept of how a business runs. Not saying that I'm a regular Rockefeller or anything, but the basics are simply having sense. Any business that makes money by selling a product obviously has to get the materials from SOMEWHERE. And if they happen to also create the materials themselves, that only cuts out the middle man. Also even more than that, not every company has a partnership with say a metal working company to refine the steel and ship it over. They buy it and transform it to into their own needs. That's exactly what is done in wow. You pay somebody to give you the materials you need (saronite ore), maybe pay somebody else to refine them (smelt it into bars), now it's in a form you can work with so you begin to create the products you sell.

I know this is obvious to you, but again, you need to know your customers. These fools are the ones that you're selling that 90g belt buckle to, they're the ones that will spend 100g on a meta gem with the raw gem on AH for 30g. They have zero clue about the AH game nor do they have the smallest desire to. So when people start up with their "QQ u buy 2 cheap no1 sell 2 this nub they screw you" you can't simply ignore them. Because the mob mentality instantly creeps in and they think that you're using professions to make a lot of gold and not doing dailys like one of them.

If you're not one of them, part of their social group, or cool happy friendly helpful ppl, you're "the bad guy." Is it jealousy? No, not at all. It is simply you being different, not being part of "the group." Well, I've never been one to automatically follow the group by default since what's popular isn't always right. When this starts up with more than one person I'll generally wait a few minutes so their goldfish minds can go back to being distracted by their purples and I can go about my business of making the business.

The best part, and one of the most satisfying things in this game, is reading this while you collect 4 CoD mails of things you're being told you'll never get for that price. Just yesterday I picked up 5 stacks of abyss crystals for my price which people laughed at AS I was getting tells from people wanting to sell to me. Funny isn't it?

In WoW you'll hear of "some jerk ripping people off" a lot more than some dude buying cheap gems from people that hate the AH. But what they'll never realize is that just because you CAN sell a scarlet ruby for 80g doesn't mean a damned thing. All that matters is if you WILL sell it for that much. Sure I have an epic twink piece that I COULD sell for 3k gold, but I can't be bothered to repost it constantly. And just because it's worth 3k to somebody doesn't mean that as soon as I got it I instantly got 3k in my pocket.

And even more than that, if I never go to the AH to list said twink item, I'll never have that money. Because I could someday sometime do that, doesn't mean that I will because I love having it. I like being able to show off to all the 400+ members in my social, bg, raid, pvp, leveling guild the nifty purple that I have! That means it's gold value is nothing and still stay that way. So if you have something that could be worth some gold, it's completely useless until it gets used or sold.

Like I said before, anything in your bags not being used won't be making you any money. So if you have 50 stacks of gems and just letting them sit there, they are worth exactly squat. There is no reason you should have a need for 500 forest emeralds by the time cataclysm comes out.

There's a big difference between stockpiling and hording. An intelligent person stockpiles because they know for a fact that they'll have a use for such things in the near future. Your typical WoW M&S will horde things for no other reason than the sake of having them, the whole 'he who has the most toys...' type of mentality at play. But hey, it's your $15 a month, not mine.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Today I'm going to give you a sort of time line of my history playing on the AH. I'm doing this so you can trace your own steps against mine and have a rough comparison to where you are, could be, should be, and going to be. Of course I am in no way perfect and don't work at your pace, but as to an idea of the stepping stone process this should be helpful. The idea of this post is just that, to show that you don't start instantly with a market share of everything. Rather that everybody needs to start somewhere.

In TBC I started my farming for epic mount money and the mats to make my super rofl-copter. I got the money by farming primal airs in Nagrand with the engineering toy and was making up to 30g per primal I got. Since I could get a decent amount running around on my 100% mount (since a flier was only 60% speed) this wasn't a terrible thing, but obviously not that fun. Then I went to the isle of QQ on a pvp server that the alliance owned whenever I needed more for gems and enchants or just some extra spending money. This was definitely not fun at all, but it was all I knew how to do for gold.

Fast forward to wrath where I rerolled JC and LW to replace enchanting and engineering. I got a few of the nice rare gem cuts which, along with the profession changes, ate up all of my questing money and whatever I got from selling enchanting mats I got from DE'ing quest rewards. Most of my money now was coming from when I'd cut a handful of gems and sell them now and again. It made me some decent money, I mean nothing spectacular, but it covered my expenses. I built up a few thousand gold to hold onto while slowly increasing my list of gem cuts. I could finally stop doing all dailys (minus the JC quest) and I didn't need to farm a single thing thanks to my small gem business.

I got interested in inscription eventually and started reading Gevlon's blog about how he was working it and gave it a shot. I was wondering how they could make money when I'd see a dozen pages of glyphs at 3-5 gold each. To my surprise I was making a good 2k every single day from the word go. Sadly it took me about 90 minutes for ONLY inscription. This was mostly because I had no clue about what addons to use, how to scan only glyphs in the AH, how to post them all faster, etc. I was still a noob basically.

I was still also cutting rare gems now and again with the help of somebody that had all the cuts that I didn't have. They were selling loads of them and making almost as much as I was with far less effort. So instead of saying 'oh they must just be lucky' I got into to later on. I got all my addons sorted out and figured out which ones were for what and so forth. Now I'm all sorts of high tech, cutting my posting time in half, and was filthy rich with my 10k gold.

I was then realizing that I could make a lot of money effectively and I decided to get the red dragonhawk I've always wanted since level 10. I farmed baron's mount, grinded out sha'tari skyguard rep all while keeping my auctions current. Then it came time to buy the expensive mounts and spent every last gold I had and got the 100 mounts achievement. Out of morbid curiosity I totaled up how much I had spent, from hard currency to emblems, SKS, and the time I could have been farming if I decided. It wasn't a pretty number to see in the red.

I figured that if I could get that much gold in a month or so that I could do even better. That's when I really started to work my JC and started investing into epic gems and stocking up on more rare gems. With a semi-decent bank roll from my glyph trade I was able to buy a large number and only waited a week for the money come back in as profit.

Once I had worked my way into the gem market, I started reading other gold blogs and more of the greedy goblin. I found other tips on things that sell a lot like belt buckles. When I needed one I would buy the mats since they were ALWAYS a good 20g cheaper than a crafted one. So I would think "only a retard would buy one of those" still having a bit of faith left in the general intelligence level. Heh I was wrong on that one. This is when I started to fully realize just how impatient and ignorant a lot of people could get and that they would spend a ludicrous amount of gold on things priced triple the material costs. Once I had accepted this I started to be less conservative with my buying and selling which increased my profit margins greatly.

I brought my BS/Enchanter over and started making buckles then decided to craft some enchanting rods while I was at it. This is when I really started to branch out on my own. I would go through all my profession skill windows and look at all the things I could make that weren't gear. I'd look at them and think "do people actually use this crap? Apparently they do. I used lil' sparky's workshop to give me a list of average AH prices of them and glanced at the materials needed. Then I'd total up the mat price and craft a few to sell if it looked profitable. Some worked, some didn't. But the point is that I was learning and exploring on my own and not from somebody saying to go do X, Y, and Z then just following a guide book while not understanding what I was doing.

I started remembering all the vendors that sold various specialty things and decided to fly out and try to auction some. I sold some vendor pets, a few engineering mats, and a bunch of profession bags. I started to leave a toon that I stopped playing parked out there to buy more every now and then which gave me another market to work in. Around now is when I had a large stockpile built up and started my bankers guild and bought 2 tabs for it so all my bankers could have access to it without having to juggle mail all the time. I dedicated one for inscription goodies and another for all my excess gems and miscellaneous items.

A while later I get into enchanting scrolls and bought another bank tab. I filled the new tab with enchanting mats and vellums then went to town. A good 30% of them sold for under material costs, some I even just dropped. But the ones that did sell are still selling VERY well. So my first walk into that market wasn't pretty, but it wasn't a loss either. In fact being my first major market start up, it was extremely messy in all honesty since it took up a lot more time, space, and money than inscription did.

And now we come to today. Here I am with hundreds of thousands of gold, loaded with mounts and epic gems and still gunning for more. What should you take from this? That anybody can do it and nobody needs to be farming forever. Don't let yourself be stuck in the mine or knee deep in the mud picking flowers. Get out there and don't work your ass off, just be clever. Pay attention and don't get stuck in the 'my friends all farm and do dailys so I should be doing the same thing.' It doesn't take a genius to work the AH, only patience and an observant mind. If you just can't be bothered then you can't be bothered and will spend hours stuck doing a boring grind to get something that you can "just farm for free."

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

This profession is definitely a sleeping giant in the AH game believe me. When I first looked at tailoring, I only saw the leveling guide for it and the 3,000 frostweave cloth it needed to get anywhere high. With frostweave being nearly useless (so I thought) and having plenty of bandages I would just vendor the crap and not bother posting a stack of 9 on AH for a few silver. It just wasn't worth my time to save up several thousand cloth at a handful a time from whenever I'd pick some up in a heroic. The same went for iceweb spider silk, which I'd only get when leveling, I'd think who wants this crap, no gear needs it!

Boy was I misinformed. This is a very low maintenance easy money profession, easier than any other if you ask me. And if you happen to play on your tailor a lot, the cloth scavenging passive ability you get really increases the amount of frostweave you find by a lot. I've found that not only can I get up to 9 cloth from a single mob, but when I'm doing heroics after somebody loots a body, I can also loot it sometimes for an extra 3-6 cloth.

To start off your tailoring empire, you'll need an absolutely massive stockpile of frostweave, netherweave, eternal fire, eternal life, iceweb spider silk, a handful of frozen orbs, and several stacks of infinite dust. Basically you'll need maybe a week before you can start by checking the AH daily during prime time (when people run chain heroics) to stock up on cloth to hold onto so you can get started. In addition to that, you'll also need your tailor to be exalted with the argent crusade and the kirin tor factions for the spell thread patterns. The things that you'll be crafting with all this are netherweave and frostweave bags and epic spellthreads. Sure that doesn't seem like a lot of things to sell, but the pure volume that you can sell in two days is astounding. On your average day, I'll sell 40 nehterweave bags and 20 frostweave bags along with two of each spellthread.

The way I do it is I'll post 8 netherweave bags along with 8 frostweave and then post 4 of each spell thread. Then I wait an hour and post more bags and more and more! OK I don't really do that, but in all seriousness, you really can sell that many that often, trust me. Basically here's what the stuff break down to:

You can use that to base your purchases and prices off of. If all you ever sell are bags, that pays for all the repairs you'll ever need. Start selling the spellthreads and you'll never have to worry about money for raids ever again. For my server the happy price to buy cloth at is 5g a stack for both kinds. As for the spellthreads the only problem with them is getting the spider silk for it. After my initial find of 30 on AH for a decent price, I've had to buy it all from trade chat.

So whenever you're passing through town make a post that you're buying it for X gold and to CoD you. Works especially well when I'm waiting for a tank to que for a random (can't join groups or I lose my que spot sadly). I almost never see more than two other people listing spellthreads on the AH so the competition is small and, so far at least, not very aggressive. That's good because you don't have to worry about checking your auctions, only takes 30 seconds to post everything, and then you're done until tomorrow or the day after.

The rare quality threads I don't bother with since the ones I made took me almost 2 weeks to sell off for a measly 8g profit. Granted that's about what I make from selling netherweave bags, but those sell faster than I can make them. As I always say, consistency is important. Once the patch comes and specialty cloth loses the CD I may experiment in making epic gear to sell. Other than that I'll make a few tuxedo sets and see if they can bought up or not, but since it's a rather small customer base I don't expect much from it.

That's all the important info that you want to know about tailoring, now here's the stuff you need to know. Bags take a very long time to make and you have to craft a ton of them. I try and keep 20 on hand at all times in case somebody decides to fill out their bank and character slots. It also requires you to check the AH every single day for cloth to buy out since you'll be using such large amounts of it. Luckily cloth is rather cheap so this profession doesn't need a huge start up amount. The same things goes for spider silk, this stuff can be a pain sometimes to get a hold of, again due to the amount you need and that most people vendor it.

Once the patch comes, I'll be converting a lot of my eternals and imbued frostweave cloth into specialty cloth and see what profits I can get from that market. All the ulduar patterns that use it are being cut in half so not as many may sell, but the ToC patterns are untouched (currently) so people that get that stuff made will still need to buy a bunch at a time. As soon as the patch comes I'll be starting this and update you all on how it goes. In the mean time, I'm off to go buy more cloth!

If anybody has other suggestions for tailoring goods to sell please comment and I'll give them a go. After all, it's always fun to expand your horizons now and then.

I will leave you with this screen shot of my bag sales every other hour.

Good lord have I been stockpiling a ton of stuff! I've gotten myself loaded up with another several hundred eternal fires, a thousand saronite, another few stacks of epic gems, and working up tailoring. With the new patch info I've been making it a point to buy as much as humanly possible of all the stuff I'll be needing. This is mostly mixed eternals, saronite, and cloth. Here's the report for this last week by the bankers.

Woooo, might just be another week before my second gold cap! Screen shots will come once it's hit.

Detailed Recap--------------Tomorrow I'll be posting another profession how to for tailoring. All I have to say about that now is KA-CHING! As for this last week, I've been buying a lot more like I said, but most of it won't be earning me a profit for a while. Most likely won't be making my money back until the patch comes or a week or two later on. I'm playing it semi safe still so I'm only buying the stuff I'd be using regardless, patch or not. I've still been struggling to keep a stock of gems and had to raise my thresholds once again. That's the sheer amount of gems I'm moving, especially scarlet rubys which I'm selling as soon as I buy them raw. As for the other professions, I'm barely getting enough abyss crystals to keep berserk scrolls up, but still enough none the less.

Stocked up on another thousand dust and few hundred cosmics in hopes that the pvp gear influx increases demand for new enchants. I managed to sell out again of all my large brilliant shards, so old world enchants are going to be on pause for a bit. Damn things are up to 30g on AH now, which isn't going to be making me a profit.

Also I finally managed to off load all of the snowfall inks I've had piling up to somebody making cards. I sold 14 full stacks of them for 5g each, leaving me with 60 inks to use for my own purposes. At 5g per ink and buying flowers for 10g/stack means that every glyph was almost pure profit since it's very common for me to get 1.5 snowfall inks per stack of herbs. With a bank tab and personal bank still filled with assorted inks, I doubt I'll have to worry about this for a while.

Also from now on my material costs are going to be rather skewed because I've been doing all my buying on my mage since they can teleport. But I now am going to need to post all my tailoring goods from them since I just don't have the bag space and they're the one that's crafting it all regardless. I know I can look at my AH statistics page and to a bit of math to figure out exactly how much they made that week, but this is getting to be too much of a hassle.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Since I've had the weekend to do some thinking about all the new changes coming to the AH scene, it's time to share with all of you what my plans are. Firstly, I'm obviously buying any cheap frozen orbs I can get my mits on. I'll be turning these into either frost lotus' or crusader orbs to sell off depending on what gives me the better profit margin. If nothing else, I'll definitely be able to resell quite a few of them for a nice amount. But since I still use them for off hands and spell threads, I can't afford to sell all of them off. This will be adjusting my thresholds a bit since they can be sold for far more than before.

I'm also selling off my eternal fires for around 30g each, keeping only what I need for the time being. I'm hoping that their prices will drop a bit and orbs will hang around the 25g mark so I'll have much better flexibility with things that use them. My reasoning is that raid orbs don't sell too much and with the drop rate of frost lotus going up so much the prices of orbs will hang around what they're at.

I'm not changing anything I do with inscription as the change of 2 inks to 1 doesn't have an effect on the current market. However once the patch hits, I'll be crafting 10 of all the glyphs that are effected by skill/specs instead of my normal 5 of each. This also includes extras of the standard PvP rogue glyphs and their variations for the cookie cutter mut/prep spec. I'm expecting a lot of people to be trying out the new specs, especially shadow step rogues in PvP. If you head over to Arena Junkies and check out the rogue forums, you'll see a ton of people that while not convinced of how viable Sub will be are still going to try it out. That means they all need a fresh set of glyphs, will likely try out several before deciding to stick with it or go back to mut/prep. In which case they have to buy another set of glyphs from yours truly.

Here's the list of glyphs I'm expecting to sell more than the normal amount of. Note, some of these are NOT recommended glyphs at all. However the customer is always right and will usually buy whatever happens to look correct first (I love those people).

With tailoring, I'm stocking up on imbued frostweave and mixed eternals to craft a ton of specialty cloth to sell off. Sure the prices are going to drop (mark my words, sell your entire stock now) with the CD being removed, along with the hassle of making them. But it won't be such a pain for me to get into that market because of that and I can turn my excess eternals (and potentially extra orbs) into money now instead of money two weeks from now. It also brings more options to the table so long as I can keep stocked up on them, my total income will go up a bunch. And since cloth is losing the CD, the glacial bag which previously wasn't worth the effort to make, will likely go up in price as it's getting a week long CD. Still no clue if it will sell or not.

Mining! My miner is a level 68 noob that only is there to make saronite. With the patch titansteel smelting is losing the daily CD on it so prices will drop a bit while prices of titanium/saronite bars may rise so people can mass craft the titansteel they are saving up. I expect a temporary increase in the mats for titansteel before it falls down again. Since my miner can fly, I may take the time to finish leveling it up to make my own titansteel as that's yet another market for me, but I'm always short on saronite and with all the eternals I'll be needing I might not have the stock for it. We'll see how it pans out. Regardless of the price on the mats changing, sell off any you have left.

JC and enchanting! I'm doing my best to stock up on as much of these mats as humanely possible, mostly orange resilience gems, red dps gems, and armor enchants. With the large increases coming to HK's and doing random BG's with bonus rewards just like random dungeons, a lot more people will be getting pvp gear. And as with any influx of gear, a huge demand comes for gems and enchants so I'll be making extras of the usual gear enchants. Sadly my server is in a drought of infinite dust and crystals, the price on dust is hovering around 2g each, and crystals are just coming in slow. What I will do however is anything I'm low on stock I'll stop selling now and wait for a potential price spike. If things don't go up like I expect, they'll still sell as usual so there won't be a loss.

Friday, February 19, 2010

I had written this post while I was reading the new patch notes, but it got so long that I'm going to have to split it up into 2 separate posts. So since the weekend buying/stockpiling time is coming up, I'll give you the TL;DR version first with a few minor explanations here and there and go much more in depth later. Regardless, you can be assured that a lot of changes are coming to your local AH. And since knowing is half the battle, go and read the notes now! Patch notes!

Ok here we go!

~Many glyphs that need 2 inks will only need 1 ink. Also a few DK (chains of ice and disease) and Rogue glyphs (anything for the subtly tree) are going to be selling a good bit more due to talent and glyph changes. post more than normal on patch day.

~Frozen orbs will be able to be traded in for other trade goods. Same way that you can turn leather into furs now. You can see exactly what on mmo-champion for specifics, but the list is eternals, lotuses, runed/crusader orbs, and a tailoring only flying carpet pattern (lets all hope it's BoE). Expect eternals to sink for a while then creep up slowly.

~Double honor gains will make more pvp gear acquired which will need gems and enchants. There's already a shortage of all enchanting mats on my server, so my sales will slow down in case of a price spike for this.

~Specialty cloth CD's are getting that CD removed and can now be made anywhere. Expect these to drop a good amount in price. Also glacial bags are getting a CD added to them, likely due to the cloth changes.

~Titansteel bars are also losing their CD, so if you have a bunch sell them for a good price now, expect them to drop as well.

~Frost lotuses you also want to sell asap as their drop rate will go up by 50% making them a lot cheaper.

~If you're in the business of selling ulduar crafted epics, sell out now as their material reqs are also dropping by a lot. Don't know the specifics yet sadly.

~And the last best change for this patch, you can now finally skip the intro RP junk for CoS. Thank god!

Ok that's the highlights, read the notes for yourself and later on I'll give you a write up of what I intend to do about all of this. In the mean time, I am stocking up on just about everything. Tons of saronite to xmute into titanium, eternals of all sorts (especially curious on how new titansteel prices wind up). Oodles of enchanting mats, frozen orbs, you name it. Going to have to sleep on this to have a real solid plan of action.

Remember, this is just a first impression, I'll be posting my finalized thoughts on all of this tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by!

EDIT: I bought 5 stacks of orbs for 7g each and sold 3 for 55g each, and another 10 for 35g each. They have now settled to 25g each on AH, good times!

Thursday, February 18, 2010

You've read me mention the importance of stockpiling mats now and again. Today I'll give you a good example of why it's so important using some generic average sales. In your average week I'll sell loads of things and I need enough materials purchased to supply myself for the following week. If you run out of mats, you stop making gold obviously and since you never know how much of what you'll sell, a big stock is important. You also never know when a price spike will come around or a shortage of mats which will hinder your sales greatly.

Now that's a decent sized list and as I'm sure you can imagine, is a truck full of materials. It equates to something like several hundred saronite bars (or a thousand ore), hundreds of dust, dozens of abyss and cosmics, a thousand leather, a few thousand cloth, thousands of ink of the sea. Now that's a rather tall order to buy in a single day or two, but it's what a serious AH player requires on a slow week. Now if you tried to purchase all of this in a single day, you'd end up draining the entire supply and need to pay a premium for the rest. This is why you always stock up so that you never have to pay the high prices.

When you really get into the AH game, you can't be afraid of not selling or over stocking yourself because everything has a price, and somebody is going to pay it. Some things might take a week or two to sell like crafted epics or high end twink gear, but they WILL sell. One key yo success in the AH game is to know what you can buy 30 full stacks of while being confident that they'll all sell that week. Once you get this down (which comes solely from experience) you'll have a strong foothold on that market.

A while ago I spent well over 2,000 gold on saronite bars at something like 1.8g each when my normal buying price is 1.6 each. I spent a bit more because the seller had such a ridiculous amount it warranted a bit extra. As I was sending the bars to my various toons that use it and stashing the rest into half a bank tab I thought to myself "Self, you won't need any more saronite this MONTH!"

Little did I know, I was greatly mistaken and was completely out in ten days with none under 50g/stack left on the AH. Mind you, I use saronite for titanium x-mutes, buckles, chains, and rods and that's all. Just from that alone you should see how easy and how quickly your business can change. After all, it's not like I'm using sarontie for every single profession in game, so there's quite a demand for saronite based products.

Now if you're just starting up a business, obviously you can't afford to drop several grand on mats. What you should do is buy enough for your first few stacks of things and go about how I recommended in my starting up post. But if you're already in the game and looking to expand, you'll want to buy a ton of mats (after doing your research of course!) at bare bones prices so you can turn a decent profit while undercutting heavily. And once you're done with that you'll have a decent supply left over after your week of price crashing (assuming you continue to buy during this time).

To sum all this up, it takes an absurd amount of mats to handle multiple professions on the AH at once. And it's also very easy to under estimate the amount you'll be selling on any given week. Because of this you'll always want to be prepared and if you end up buying more than you sell that just means that you have less crafting to do next week. As you work a profession more and more you'll get a good feeling of how much you know you need and how much extra you want to have around. Just be ever mindful of your buying threshold.

As to how much you should stockpile of what, that's entirely up to you and what you know about your market on your server. So I can't give you any pointers on that one, but use your average sales and base it off that so you can keep at least a full week of supplies around.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I can only give you so many tips on the AH game, but it's you that has to actually go out and use them. And the most important things that you will learn about making money will come from just doing it. Experience is the greatest teacher we can ever have and it cannot be given away, only earned. Experience can only be gotten by doing and only then will you be truly good at what you do. The same can be said about professional sports even, it's not until you actually compete that you get really good because you can watch and learn all you want, but until you get into the thick of it, you still don't have the necessary understanding.

The biggest enemy of doing great is doing well. Once you get to a point and you're doing well, most people tend to stop pursuing greatness and continue to just be good at what they're doing. That's because just by following a proven method will take you a few notches above the curve, but it will never get you to the top. To get there you need the experience of getting to "above average" before you can go further and learning from it.

The reason for this is because there's a lot of small little things that you won't normally notice and is difficult to even point out after you've learned them. You can also think of this as developing your instincts. Your average person won't be able to tell when a market is going to shift up or down, or know if they spend that extra few gold they can turn it into a lot more. But with experience you'll learn this small ability which applies to everything in the world. The more you do something the better your understanding becomes and that allows you to take it even farther. Simply following a guide book and going through the motions will indeed get you somewhere, but it won't get you as far as you would like usually. That's because whoever writes that guide expects you to have real interest in it and that you will look to expand your own thinking.

What does this mean to you? It means that while you may learn a lot from this blog and others like it and may increase your WoW income, but you really need to do more than take advice. You have to be attentive to what's going on around you while you do so. Pay attention to the market, don't just react to it. If prices start to drop don't just say "oh I'll just change my threshold," instead figure out why the prices have dropped off. Do this and you'll be much better prepared for when that comes to happen to another market. This is important experience and it is the hardest lesson to learn simply because you are never told when or how the lesson is being offered. Just like you never know when opportunity will knock, you always have to keep your eyes and ears open.

So from now on when you read this blog and work your AH game, pay attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it. The best advice anybody can ever give you (for anything really) is to learn from your own actions, turn mistakes and bad decisions into ways to strengthen yourself. Never stop learning, because knowing is half the battle!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Today's post is just about a simple question: how much is too much? If your buying threshold is 30 gold for a stack of saronite bars and you see a stack up for 31g, will you buy it? What about 32 gold? 33? Just how high of a price is too high to be acceptable? Well the answer of course is that it depends. Aside from the obvious things that you know about your server's economy, there's a few other things you need to keep in mind.

-Is it hard to come by?Things like this would be golden pearls, righteous orbs, essences of air. Basically things you don't come across often even while leveling up.

-How much do you have left?Sometimes when you're sold out of certain mats you need to pay a higher price so you can keep selling. Even though you'll be making less money per sale, at least it's SOME money as opposed to NO money. This is where it's important to be flexible on your prices and not be too too stingy. There's been times where I had zero eternal fires or abyss crystals left so I had to raise my price quite a bit. Sure I took a dent in my profits, but I was still selling while my competition was scavenging to buy crystals for 20g while the lowest on AH was 40g (this actually happened a few times). Guess who was selling black magic scrolls for 500g a pop?

-Does it have a tendency to get flooded and then dry up?One thing I've noticed this with mostly is cloth, cosmics, and leather. Some days I can buy 20+ stacks of it, then I'll go 3 days without a single purchase. If the mats you're needing tend to have cycles like this, you don't need to pay that extra 1g just to be SURE you have enough since you already know that supply will be refreshed in just a day or two. But if it's something like epic gems on my server where I'll have one or two days where raw gem prices are decent, but then go a week or two or even three without having any supply, this is when you need to be much more flexible. When you think you could easily go a prolonged period of time without a supply and you're running low, you really should up your buying price a bit.

-Personal supplier?If you have a personal supplier and either they aren't farming or raise their sale price a bit you really need to consider their value. Do they give you bulk orders of mats? Are they consistent in their sales? How reasonable are their prices? Do you have alternatives or have a decent supply filling out the AH? You'll have to use your own judgment on this. While having a private supplier is a wonderful thing, they can get greedy now and then because there's always somebody that will pay more than you are. Base this judgment the same as everything else: convenience vs. profit.

-How often do you run out?I know from my own experience that it's nearly impossible to stay stocked up on saronite bars or borean leather. If this is the case with you, that means that the things you're crafting with those mats are selling a ton. And if you're selling that much to constantly be in need of more mats, raising your price isn't such a bad thing. The reason is the usual answer of consistency. When you're selling a lot of something, you always want to keep stocked up because you know for a fact that you're going to continue selling a lot. I've raised the price I pay for saronite and leather several times over the course of this blog alone. And what do you know, I still need MOAR!

An interesting way to think of "how much is too much" is putting it like this: How big does a pebble have to be for you to call it a rock? When does a rock become a boulder? How big is a boulder compared to a mountain? Makes it a bit more interesting than comparing 75 silver to 76 silver when you put it that way doesn't it?

One last thought on this subject and this goes out to all of you pack-rats out there (myself included). Anything you have in your bags and banks that you are not actively using or have plans to use in the near future is making you zero gold and gains you absolutely nothing. Get rid of it! Since my main is a tank, they have several bags filled with assorted gear and even an entire bag filled with trinkets. All of this stuff I do actively use when a troublesome encounter demands perfection in gear. I also have a handful of things that I keep around for sentimental value. Gear such as my first piece of tier 6, a trinket I spent ages looking for, etc. I keep them because every time I see them I remember some of the best times playing this game, so I am getting something from it.

But that lovely black dress you have in your male character's bank...yeah, toss it.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Ok, same deal as last week, but with new and improved moneys! Also keep in mind that my gold spent is total across all materials, not X gold for gems, Y gold on inks and such. Also my per profession income is not just a single profession either. This is because I have bankers handling several different markets at once. There aren't enough open character slots to have one banker for rare gems, one for enchanting and such. Though I could do all my buying for a specific market from the toon that does that banking, but you never know when you'll find a good deal. I'm usually bouncing around my toons that are in different towns to suit their needs. Also doing my buying from a mage is amazing since where ever I happen to be I can port right over to the seller, or to a town to snatch up more goodies from the AH there.

Also keep in mind when you see something on AH for X gold, you can usually get it by posting in trade for X - 30g. This is how I get the majority of my epic gems. The normal AH price for them is around 160 up to 180. But in the infamous /2 I can see them posted for 130-140 a piece. Makes my profits much better. For the expensive things I go to trade chat, for the more common goods like leather or herbs, the AH works just fine. Remember it doesn't matter what the market price is, all that matters is how much YOU paid for it.

Gearing up an alt at 80 with epic flying and 245 epics sorta makes a dent in your profits now doesn't it? Yes I count that as an expense because that money could have easily gone into more mats or dropped into the guild coffers.

Ya know, some people might have a wonderful feeling when they've sold out of something, but not me. I look at it as lost potential. With all the talk I do about the importance of stockpiling, I'm sure you can understand why it's important. I have completely sold out of all my gems, LW goods, and a few choice enchanting mats. Sure that means that I have made a lot of money, but as you can see from my goal, it means I'm slowing down greatly in reaching it because of that. And also since my baby mage is nearing 80, a good chunk was spent on them (merlin's robe, epic flying, etc.).

I've also taken a bit of a hiatus from the glyph market, so this week I've been back to my deep undercutting again. I've noticed more and more names pop up on several pages of glyphs so back this this bit again.

So all my gems have been sold, fresh out of leather, some mats for enchanting old world things I've had to raise my price on. Smith goods have been selling constantly. My lovely vendor bought pets are selling a full set every other day with the ones from dalaran selling every single day. Also since saronite prices have gone up again, there's no point in buying it to prospect as the profits would be too small to warrant the effort.

TAILORING!I've taken tailoring on my new mage and I must say, bags are impossible to have a stockpile of. By the time I finish 5 quests, all 15 bags I had up on AH have sold (a mix of frostweave and normal netherweave bags). And this is with me buying a few dozen stacks of cloth at a time! I may eventually start crafting some imbued netherweave bags, but I generally need the arcane dust for my enchanting, but I'll give it a shot regardless and see how it goes this week. Still working on the rep for the epic thread patterns so next weeks report will be based mostly on my new market. I will say this though, it takes too god damned long to make a netherweave bag, I mean seriously...

Sunday, February 14, 2010

On every server, you have different times that people will be buying stuff, but the times are generally the same regardless of population. However some servers are completely dead in the night time or early morning. You should make it a point to see if your server is one of the ones that has no activity late at night or in the mornings and if it's the usual noon to 3pm and 5pm to 11pm servers. This should guide when you do your posting on the AH. All of this of course assumes that you don't camp the AH, and I hope you don't. My server is 100% legally deceased after midnight hits. Because of this, I won't post any new auctions after 11:30pm since it will all be undercut by the time I next look at the AH. Yes I know I'll be bound to be undercut at any point just as likely, but if I undercut the competition at midnight, they'll undercut me again and neither of us will be selling. That means that the undercutting does nothing but lower the prices.

Like I said in my inscription post, undercutting without reason is silly. If I post an auction at prime time and post it again later, there's a good chance I sold a good amount of stuff. But if I undercut and post again lat at night or early in the morning, the prices go down but nothing gets sold, leaving me wit h a lower profit margin the following day. Keep this in mind when you work your business and know your server's good and off hours. However if you're on a server with several late night guilds, or just a very high population one, then posting at night might get you some decent income. Knowing when NOT to sell is just as important as knowing when to sell. Besides, a thousand unsold auctions is one hell of a loss in deposit fees.

This can all go back to the basic basic tip of "know your market." If you don't know who you're selling to, you won't know WHEN they want to buy. Big selling days are Tuesday and Friday, and sometimes Saturday. The weekend is usually when you want to do your mass buying since a lot of people will be home all day and spend a good chunk of that time farming just for you. Take advantage of what is known as "Saronite Saturday" and stock up a lot while waiting another two days to sell it all. Now I'm not saying NEVER list at night or ONLY buy on the weekends, but again, just simple tips and guidelines for you to start with.

There is no be all end all rule, just guides for you to adapt to your own situation. All successful AH players know what works for them on their server. If I transferred my whole alt bank to your server, I'd likely lose a good amount of money if I kept doing things exactly the same because the whole market will change. Time, goods, and services are only worthwhile at certain places. The same thing is true in the real world. If you gave me 20 kilos of gold, I'd kiss you. Go to Australia and hand that over to an Aborigine native and they'll likely look at you funny.

So when do you usually do your posting? Are you on a late night or high pop server? How does this influence your timing?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

I came up with an idea for an experiment I'd like to do, but I'm not entirely sure on how to go about doing it. What I want to do is prove that I only spend 60-90 minutes a day doing my auctions, but running a fraps of the whole thing isn't that practical since the video will be HUGE. I can't make a new toon and show their /play time because I can't prove that I was ONLY on that one toon. I'll also be switching toons, crafting, and the like so that wouldn't work regardless. And a ton of screen shots also wouldn't work because that would just be far too clunky to go through them all.

I'd really like to do this so I can prove that you don't need to camp the AH, have several accounts, or anything absurd like that in order to get gold capped. If nothing else it can prove that you can make a good amount of gold with very little work. So in the mean time, I'll be thinking of ways that I can pull this off and any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. Any suggestions I'll be sure to make a point of looking into and will post any updates on how my research into them is coming. And should a reader give me a suggestion that I use I'll be sure to make a point of thanking you in the following post. In addition I'll let you take over the blog for a day even!

I'll be dedicating my weekend posts to this project from now on as I get more ideas and thoughts collected.

I read a post the other day on JMTC about profession leveling kits. This is when you put together all the mats needed to level a profession from 1-450 in one sitting. The value of this is obviously high because of the sheer amount of mats needed and of course the ease of use since most of the hard work is done for you already. The cost is equally high. It takes a good amount of effort to put one of these together, even for one as simple as inscription. But even more than this, it takes A LOT of effort and time to gather it all at a decent enough price for a profit. One option is the mail box if you have a toon that does zero auctions and can afford to have a clear mail box. The other is several dedicated guild bank tabs. Since you'll need around a hundred different stacks, you will need more than one tab. Or you can just use an alts entire pack and bank for it all.

After that is shipment, how do you get it to a buyer? Obviously via trade window is going to take way too long and be too complicated to keep track of for them. The other option, and likely best, is to CoD them all to your customer with an even amount need per mail. You can always invite them to your guild bank and give them access to only the tabs with the mats in them, but do you really trust yourself and them enough to do that? I know I'd be worried that I left "unlimited access to gold withdrawal" turned on for everyone.

So we have a reasonable way of shipment and, if we have a spare alt, we have storage. naturally the purchasing will be done over a rather long period of time with dedicated searches. Now for the hard part: sales. First we have to ask my common question, who are our customers? Who would have several thousand gold ON HAND, have a need for such a service, and not think they can just farm it for free? One potential answer is serious raiders. People know that min/max is key to beating hard encounters. Another answer would be people who love playing alts. Granted most people that spend a lot of time on alts know to take a gathering profession to support their crafting profession, but others like to have everything ready. Maybe some people, like myself, don't like to grind even while leveling.

With all that being said, we need a sale pitch of some form since you'll have to sell this in trade chat. Along with that, we need a price to set as well. My normal bare minimum price is a 30% mark up, but with such a huge inventory being sold and all the effort taken to ensure that all mats needed to max a profession are there, a bit more should be in order. After all, when I leveled engineering in TBC for the tier 6 goggles, I'd gladly have paid 6k to max out engineering in an hour and lose all the hassle of going to the AH, farming what I couldn't buy, etc. All this is when it only cost me about 3.5k or so not counting the hour or 2 of farming I had to do.

I haven't tried this business adventure before, but it sure seems interesting, might be fun, and has potential for good profit. Out of all the professions out there, the most expensive (and demanding on inventory space) are smithing, JC, and engineering. LW also needs an insane amount of space, I know I've power leveled it twice. So out of the remaining professions which are commonly leveled in a day? Enchanting is one, alchemy as well since people like having another x-mute spec for guild gem services. Tairloring of course, but that's a rarity it seems lately. Lastly there's inscription, but that's a small market indeed. Most scribes out there took it at release to check it out, others that are usually taking it now are people who want to make money with it. There's no need to be a scribe to skip the sons of hodir chain since the enchants are all BoA now.

Which one would I pick? I have no idea. I am planning on looking into it however and will post more as things develop. The potential for profit is huge, but so is the chance to lose all the gold for my alts flying training. We shall see soon enough! Have any of you tried this or thought about it? If so post away and if there's enough interest, I'll make another post as a collection of all the ideas presented and go from there.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Ok last week I said that I would be doing all my purchasing from the same toon and keep much better track of which professions made what. Unfortunately I can't have a single banker for each market I'm in, so you'll just have to bear with me on this. I also spent a good amount before hand on epic gems, inks and such. Because of that my out going gold compared to the income will be a bit skewed, but I'll estimate it to the best of my abilities.

Detailed Recap--------------I haven't had the time to craft many glyphs so that market has been almost non existent. It also requires the most at the computer time, so with as many projects as I have to work on right now, I mostly have been sticking to crafting gems and only making glyphs when I have the time for it. I've also once again run out of stock for several rare gems and all epic gems, so their profits will be slower for next week unless I can come into a large supply over night. Also oddly enough, the prices of epic leg armors have gone way up to the point of them being worth crafting. So much so that I've sold out of arctic fur and most of my heavy leather is being drained into the profession bags and armor kits. I still have the only borean armor kits on auction and have raised my price by 10g so far and they're still selling.

Perhaps I can go another few gold up, but for now I'll be keeping the price where they're at now. When prices get high that's when competition comes about and drives them all back to the ground. I'd much rather have a market all to myself so it's fire and forget than have crazy high prices and rarely selling something. Consistency, see a theme here?

I'm still hunting for a few enchanting plans, stats to chest and icy chill to weapon. There's still the odd person here and there wanting 4 stats for their boa gear and icy weapon adds a glow to your weapon. Stats I expect to sell well, but icy weapon will likely just sell one or two a week. Other than that, sales for all other old world enchants have been as steady as ever minus healing to bracers, so that's being sent to my new mage to blow stuff up with (frost mage AoE is fun as hell!).

Monday, February 8, 2010

I've had a people people comment, pst me in game, or post on other forums (hello fellow tankadins) that I've inspired them to start amassing a large amount of gold. Well, now is a good time to do so and this post is for you. Just some basic pointers you'll need to get started.

When starting a business, there's several steps to take and things you'll need up front. The first thing you need is a few professions over skill 400. Based on what you have access to, you'll need a decent amount of start up cash. I recommend something around 2,000g to start. That means that you'll have to grind, do dailys, whatever you need to get your funding. Now that you've chosen a market, have your start up cash, you need to stockpile. Make sure you get a good amount so that you can stay posting at your low threshold for a while. If you're getting into BS, make two full stacks of buckles, glyphs will want at least 5 of everything that needs ink of the sea and etheral inks, things of this nature.

You want a decent stock, but don't spend all your money up front because everything won't sell up front. You need to be able to post items regularly so that you don't get forced out of the market by other sellers. In addition to a stock of things crafted to sell, you also need a stock of the mats to craft more so when you sell out you have more to make in case the materials take a spike up in price.

Once you get your mass crafting finished it's time to post. Go tho the AH, set up your addons the way you need and start with the undercutting. When entering a new market, I always make it a point to undercut a large amount, see my post on How to: undercutting for the full explanation. Now it's very important to not get discouraged when you are first starting. Most likely your market won't be making a crazy profit over night, so you need to be patient. After a bit of time passes and most of the casual sellers leave the market, you can start to undercut normal amounts and your business will start to take off. Don't be too concerned with spending to keep mats in stock, this is common especially when you're into many different markets. I myself still worry about this from time to time, mostly with epic gems due to spiky sales.

Now you have a foothold in your market of choice, you're posting and selling items frequently. Now it's time to branch out to make even more gold. Take a look at your options, maybe you want to get into LW. Buy a ton of borean leather and find a LW to turn it into heavy for you. Get some mining bags made, armor kits, the works. Since most of these have short cast times, it's not as much of a hassle to get a bunch of them done all at once. When getting into another market, it's very important to look into it for a few days before you start buying up the mats. Look at what sells, the normal price, normal price of the mats, when they sell, how often they sell, etc etc. If you have access to the needed profession and think that it would be a decent business move to get into it then go for it.

A few markets that have very little entry costs are:-Enchanting rods-Belt buckles-Armor kits-Profession LW bags-Vendor pets

And the TL;DR version of this post is get 2,000 gold, pick a market, craft and post, once you have good money built up expand into other markets, repeat.

AH giggle of the dayA while ago I was receiving angry tells from a competing jewel crafter. Things like I shouldn't undercut as much as I do, I won't make money like this, I should just stop posting so they can "have their turn." So I continue to undercut by several gold each time they post under me by a few silver. A week or two passes and I see that same person selling tons of raw and cut gems for well below material price. I buy them up, relist, and proceed to sell them over a few days at my normal price. I have yet to see them post a single gem in almost a month now. Now I'm back to undercutting by only a few gold at a time as opposed to 10. And the market is back to being 90% all mine.

Lesson learned: Persistence is key, keep doing what you know works and it will.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the process of leveling a mage. Along with the few niche markets I've come across, it's also given me the opportunity to help spell out some of the issues with leveling. A lot of people think that you need a lot of alts to make money since you'll have access to more professions. This is only a convenience, not a necessity. So lets look at the cost of a brand new toon. All professions will be based off of the guides from wow professions.

Some things that I won't be counting are repairs, basic trade goods like threads, personal reagents, colored dye, junk like that. I also won't be accounting for mounts and riding training either since your quest reward gold will pay for all of it by the time you're 80.

You get a gathering profession, but since There's no way of knowing exactly how much you'll make from it, what you'll use on professions and such, I'll just leave it blank.

Perhaps you bought a handful of greens or blues to make the lower levels go by faster, maybe a few common gems for the quest rewards in the outlands area.-100g

You'll most likely need to buy some healing and/or mana potions along the way.-30g

You also decide to level a profession up to at least 440 skill level so you can make anything worthwhile. We'll use tailoring as the example since it's fairly in the middle for prices and I just so happen to be leveling it as well. I will be using my servers prices and under estimating the average cost of them since you likely can get them all at normal or below prices because you won't need them all at once.

So that's the initial cost of getting a new toon up to level 80. Yes I know, you didn't purchase the mats for your profession, but see the link to Gevlon's post on how farming doesn't make something free. Each node you stop at, every mob you skin all takes time, and it all adds up. If grinding isn't a great G/hour idea at 80, it won't be at level 43 either. Now after all of these costs of leveling, that is how much money you have LOST.

What does all this mean to you? The short version is that if you don't use your new profession to make a few thousand gold, you're at a loss.

Yes you do gain a new toon for it, but you don't NEED an expensive profession, you can go skinning mining if you wish if all you want is a new toon to mess around on.

I have a rogue that's a miner skinner and I only use him for general fooling around. I have tons of fun on him and pull 6k dps. Since I'll never take him into any serious raiding environment, there's no need to drop several thousand on a profession I don't want to try out to make some money and the ease of having it readily available to me.

Time is money, and time is the ONLY thing in life that you can't ever get back. If you lose money, you can work more to make it up. If your farm burns down, you can rebuild. If you lose your house, you can eventually get a new one. If your glass of whiskey runs out, you can always get a refill.

Friday, February 5, 2010

This post is inspired by the many so called ethical debates on selling ammo in stacks of 100 at the price of 1,000. In case you're unfamillliar with this, it's when you buy a stack of 1000 arrows for 10g and post 10 stacks of 100 for 10g a stack, getting yourself a nice profit and fooling the unaware into thinking that they bought stacks of 1000. There's a lot of people that consider this a scam and some that just think it's being clever. Me? I think it's clever. I don't consider it a scam because of how obvious it is when there's a stack of 100 or 1,000. Even if you have an auction addon you'll see maybe 100 and 10... listed there, still very obvious how many are in the stack. But lets take it a step further.

Selling Icethorn herbs as single at the price of a stack. Yes some people have sold a single flower for 20g, the price of a stack. How are they able to do this? The answer is simple, most people are lazy, ignorant, and impatient. And if people were mostly none of these, I wouldn't be gold capped without doing daily quests for a year. Here's an example of what I mean.

Go to an AH and type in Cardinal Ruby. Since I'm a paladin, I'll want a Bold version for strength. There's a million and one JC's on my server that can cut it, just as there's plenty of engineers that can make ammo. Do I buy the bold gem for 230g or do I buy the raw cardinal ruby for 160g? I'll buy the raw gem and wait 60 seconds for a JC to cut it and leave a 10g tip, saving me a large amount for a minute of my time. If I need ammo, I'll look for an engineer to make it, give them a few stacks of eternals and tell them to go get a drink or something while they auto craft them. Just saved me a bunch of money by buying the materials.

Now most people aren't like that, and they want their stuff NOW and can't be bothered to wait a minute or two so they can get back to guarding the pavement in front of the dalaran bank looking sooo cool with their purples. So they go to the AH, lose a ton of money by buying a cut gem. In a perfect world, the price of a raw gem would be the same price as a cut gem. They all require the same material price and thus have the same price roughly (not counting a small service fee).

Now I go to the AH to buy a bold gem since I'm too impatient to wait, and I look for gems starting with the letter B and buy the first one my eyes lock onto. I buy it and oh darn, I bought a Bright gem, not a bold. Should I complain about blizzard screwing me out of my money because I'm a moron and didn't bother to look at what I was buying for more than two seconds? No, I should learn that making an assumption about what you're buying is only going to get you into trouble.

The most interesting part about this whole situation is that people that look down on selling arrows as 100s are also the same people that laugh non stop at people that buy ice cold milk for achievements at 10g each instead of from the vendor for a few copper. How is this different? Guess what, it's not.

Though I will say, there is one situation where I'll agree that selling something not in standard stack sizes is a honest to god dick move. Listing soo many of something that it takes up 8 pages on the AH so everybody has to spam the next button to get to the normal priced goods. This can be considered by blizz to be harassment through obfuscation. It's in the same category as hiding the mailbox by sitting on your retarded mammoth. That I'll agree is annoying as hell, but listing something in different stack sizes is a legit business move. Hell almost any gold making site/book tells you to do that because if you need 4 [item] you'll look on the AH for a stack of 4[item] regardless of price usually.

So if you think the 100 arrow bit is a scam, remember that next time you buy a gem that's cut, or an enchanting scroll. You just threw away money because you didn't bother to look for somebody with that profession. You wasted money because you're too lazy to look at the price of the materials. Each time I sell an epic gem for 200g I laugh because the poor sap that just bought it had to scroll past several pages of raw gems almost half that price.

Simply put, each time you make a profit with a profession, that is no different than selling arrows in 100s. The one that buys it has the option to look at raw gem prices just as they have the ability to look at the stack size. Please do not pity these people, if you're lazy, impatient, and likely a bit incompetent, you won't be getting anywhere in the world (of warcraft).

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

DISCLAIMER: Don't take my comments on twinks and pvp gearing as gospel. They're just a very basic explanation to help you understand the mentality of your potential customers, nothing more.

I posted a while ago that most gear professions don't make much money with the gear they make but the other things that they craft. Not always the case, following my post yesterday, with leveling gear. Every profession has a handful of cheap pieces you can make that are useful to new characters. Namely LW goods with agil and or stam on them. There's also some high quality twink gear that comes from normal profession crafteds and not world drop boe's. A few things that come to mind are nightscape gear from LW and some silk gear from tailoring.

Also if you remember a few weeks ago I mentioned the importance of doing your homework on what gets made when leveling a profession. Keep that in mind when picking a few items to mass craft. You could easily be flooded well below material cost indefinitely if you're not mindful of that.

Twinks are in the same catagory of thought as people just leveling an alt. Some will go all the way and spend top dollar because they want the most while they're a twink and others will only put in enough money to be competitive, but know they won't be a twink for a significant amount of time. This goes back to yesterdays post about pricing on leveling gear since it's still the same general market: low level toons that want good gear. And just like with leveling gear, BoA items won't fill out every slot. One thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to understand the basic mentality of pvp stat priority when dealing with twink gear. Which is also somewhat similar to pvp at the level cap, but also drastically different at the same time.

First off, stamina is important because otherwise you'll be dead in the time of a global cool down unless you have enough. So items with high stam on them are popular and are usually the deciding factor. Because if you sit there auto attacking against somebody doing the same the one with higher health wins. And since things like crit rating are few and far between, same with spellpower, it all comes down mostly to base stats and who has more.

However one thing that needs to be pointed out because it is just as important at 80 pvp as it is as a twink. What I refer to is hit rating. If you're a priest and you miss a mass dispell on a holy pally after a bubble, you lost a chance at a kill. If you're a level 19 rogue and your sinister strike misses, you might be dead before you regen the energy to try again. Or a frost mage missing frost bolt and letting that OP warrior in range right away. There's a very limited amount of gear with hit on it for low levels, but even for leveling, it's a prime stat (especially due to scaling).

One other note on this is that some slots have VERY limited options, 300g blues included. Basically any jewelry is important, along with capes and head pieces.

So here's a few suggestions of easily made and sold twink gear. As per usual, some fetch more than others, and some materials may be harder to get than others. Regardless, it's also a small market with little competition and steady sales which makes it worth mentioning.

Obviously this isn't a complete list, just enough to give you the gist of it all. And also note that most of these things you can craft a few dozen of at a time for cheap that you can set and forget. The blue gear you'll mostly want to just make a pair of them and wait until they sell though. Lastly, following up these low level tips with one quickie: prospect tin ore. You can likely buy a stack of it for 2-4 gold and sell each of the gems you get from prospecting for that same price each.

A few things that you can easily flip for some fast cash in your pockets are leveling greens. Even with all of the nice BoA gear, they don't fit into every slot and some people just can't be bothered to grind up the emblems or champion seals for them. That leaves you with a market with little competition as these greens/blues are only gotten when you're killing or looting mobs at that level. As I level my mage some low level greens I pick up are selling for a ton of gold above their vendor cost or DE value, to the tune of 12 to 20g profit each.

Most of you know that anything "...of the monkey" or "...of the bear" are worth looking into, but a few others are also worth selling. Namely anything that has some kind of spellpower on them, especially "...of frozen wrath" since the go to leveling spec for a mage is frost. Also leather and mail gear that is "...of power" is a great item to sell as hunters and rogues tend to need less stamina at low/mid levels since things die so fast. Naturally ANY blue that's BoE you'll want to put on auction, but you need to price it right.

Pricing is the only difficult part when selling leveling gear since you have two general schools of thought on the matter (twinks excluded). One thinking is that since you're leveling you'll likely out grow that item sooner rather than later making it almsot a waste of money. The other is that you want the leveling process to be as smooth and easy as possible, and quality gear for your level is important. As a businessman, you want to capture as much of the customers as possible and not limit yourself to a small portion of an already small market. The basic idea is to post them low enough so that the first group won't mind buying those green boots of the bear.

That means that at the same general price, they also won't mind buying the next one and the next one. You also want the price to be high enough to make it worth your while and get into the pockets of people that fully kit out their alts while leveling. One last thing to keep in mind is that unless it's a great blue item, people will not bid on it because they want the item NOW so they can use it NOW and not potentially waste levels they could be using it on.

With blues, you'll almost always having somebody searching for specific items or just anything that will last a dozen or so levels. With these it's ok to set the bid at 50g and the buy out to 200 or something to that effect. But with greens it gets a bit trickier, and therefore fun in my eyes. I generally post my greens for 8g bids and up to 15g buy outs if it isn't worth it to DE. If it happens to give illusion dust or eternal/nether essences, I'll post it for a bit more depending on those material prices. Since essences only regularly come from weapons, that's usually not an issue.

What do you do? Go into the AH armor section and type in "of the bear" among other things and have auctioneer sort by level. Buy anything that's 5g and below then repost them for 8g bid and 12g buy out. If you're using QA3 you can make a new item group called "Greens" and add those items into the group as you pick them up. This will streamline the whole process and the more you expand into different items and levels, the easier it becomes the next day. Just a simple way to flip easily sold items to cover a months worth of repairs and a few flasks. Good luck!

AH giggle of the dayI bought myself an int/stam belt for 4g since I still had a white there at level 20 something. I went and did a few quests and got that exact same green that I had just bought less than an hour later. So instead of being annoyed I looked at it as an opportunity and posted it on the AH for 12g. Before I had resumed my questing it had sold. So not only did I get a nice green for leveling, I also had made a few gold profit on top of it.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Since I started the trip to the gold cap, I hadn't leveled an alt. But I'm leveling up a frost mage (it'll also help me kite better on my tank) which is giving me a whole new perspective on the leveling process, namely gathering professions. Because of this, I'm going to have a few posts on leveling up and a few small things you can take advantage of, even at the level cap. Firstly, we all know the value of having a gathering profession for any new toon because of the sheer amount of things you'll be passing by while you level. Also the mid level materials such as mithril or rugged leather fetch a nice price with little extra effort on your part. Of course there's also the profession bonuses, but if you're planning to raid with your new alt, then dual crafting professions offer the best benefit.

However that doesn't mean you should short yourself the chance at making some nice cash to offset your leveling costs. Some are great money, others have great use to a leveling character so use your own judgment on the benefits of each and your personal needs. Here's how I look at each profession:

Mining:Pro: Possibly the best gathering profession to make money with while you level. Adds some stamina which allows you to fight longer before needing to eat or heal yourself, thus giving you fake mana regen since you're not casting heals as often.

Con: A pain to actually skill up and you may end up having to spend money on ore (like silver or gold) in order to mine where you happen to be questing at since it may take forever to find a certain node that's yellow/orange difficulty. Has zero effect on damage done.

Herbalism:Pro: Great profession bonus for non healing classes with lifeblood. I leveled my rogue and warrior with this and loved the free hot it gives you.

Con: Any class that has mana won't get much out of this since you'll be stopping to drink at some point and can just eat while you do. Only difference is that you can use this while in combat and can move while your hot ticks. Also not the best money making profession for any means unless you can leech somebody power leveling inscription or alchemy. Has zero effect on damage done.

Skinning:Pro: Requires zero side tracking since you'll always be right where your "node" is at, also takes no effort to level up and you'll be able to skin mobs you can't even kill. Also the added crit rating will improve your damage significantly while leveling since lower levels have a much higher rating to % conversions.

Con: You have to actually loot the useless grey items from a mob before you can skin them (personally, I rarely loot mobs when leveling). Also can delay you a bit (depending on latency) after you loot a mob before you get the skinning cursor to show up. Skinning also won't start making any real money at all until heavy/thick leather becomes common (but you do get a ton of it).

Enchanting?One can argue that enchanting acts as a sort of gathering profession due to the greens you can DE while you level and quest rewards. Only the problem is that you won't get nearly enough mats from this in order to skill up. You'll end up spending far more time (and therefore gold) looking for greens to DE or the mats themselves. It also won't be making much money at all until you're at least around 300. All the old world recipes that are worth selling require a lot of rep that you won't be getting while questing (aside from maybe timbermaw) or are rare world drops. So because of all of that I don't count it as a gathering profession.

All that being said, I think that skinning is the best profession for leveling up. It's fast, effortless, makes money, and ups your damage. What more can you ask for?

Monday, February 1, 2010

It's that time again. The day of server resets, raid times, patches and crashes. It also the time where I let you know what's on the up and up for making some shiny coin. It has truly been an interesting week as far as supply and demand is concerned, especially with my cut gem markets. I also started to level an alt (frost mage) and picked up tailoring so the normal 'getting started' fees for an alt with decent gear and new professions cut into my profits a good amount.

Enchanting:Finally sold a scroll of 15 strength to weapon. First sale so I'll wait until the last one I have sells before making more. However, righteous orbs were over 100g at the time which I'm almost certain was the only reason it sold. Other than that, northrend weapon enchants have been selling steadily along with the few armor enchants I noted last week.

Smithing:The demand for buckles has really gone up, I mean a lot! I'm moving more than double the amount I sold last week. All in all, still as solid a profession as ever.

Leather working:As with the buckles, I'm moving far more armor kits than before and with no competition I might add. Currently they're selling for triple the material cost, so I may raise the price up a few gold more soon. Arctic furs have gone way up in price to the tune of 75g a piece while I'm spending a mere 36g to get them. Sadly leg armors still aren't worth selling as I can get far more profit from selling the furs.

Alchemy:Gem x-mutes are still a solid few hundred a day, but meta gem sales have dropped off. Now instead of selling all the metas I make, I'm only moving a few per day. All in all not a very impressive profession still.

Jewel crafting:This is where things get interesting. Most of this week I was running on fumes for my rare gems, being completely sold out of a few colors while I had come int oa ton of epics. Rare gems uncut had doubled in price while the CUT versions were all selling for double. Mind you there were barely any raw gems on AH at any time, the few that were up were priced at around 15g and up.

This is strange because as demand goes up, price should go up as well while supply goes down (when the supply is limited). But what's happening is demand has gone way up, supply has all but vanished, and price has gone DOWN! Does that strike you as strange or is it just me? This could be due to the fact that saronite ore has gone up a bit in price to 117/18g a stack, but that's happened several times without effecting the supply of rare gems. Strange indeed.

Epic gems however had their price raw drop by 30g making them much more worthwhile than before. I had bought several full stacks of all colors and sold the normal amount each day for upwards of 100g profit per gem. Makes me a happy orc for sure.

All that being said, rare gems have been a very low portion of my JC profits but epics have been much bigger profit.

Misc:Vendor pets are still a huge market, in fact I even had to take another trip to the netherstorm to refresh my stock. Also crystallized fires have almost stopped selling, so it's time to put them into use as spell threads again since meta sales have gone down also. JC green rings have been selling at a rate of 1 a day of each type, so I'll be sticking with this market. Not a huge profit, but consistent. And like I always say, consistency is key.

With all the talk about primordial saronites, people have forgotten about a great niche market from TBC: Primals! Primals are the TBC version of eternals. Some sell for a lot, others not so much. But as with any material, it's what you use them for that matters. Introducing transmute primal might, requires one primal of each of the following:

AirManaFireEarthWater

These things are needed for many TBC epics that some people craft for the sake of having them. I myself crafted a Wicked Edge of the Planes just because I thought it looked awesome. In addition to nice looking epics (some which last you to level 78), it is also needed for the quest that teaches an alchemist X-mute mastery spec. Most primals can be bought relatively cheap at 10g an below except for airs. Primal air is gotten from long boring farming of mobs, or engineers with the mote extractor running about in nagrand.

Check your local AH for the price of primal mights and the mats for them and you just might have yourself a nice niche market. Considering that the x-mute doesn't share a CD with anything now, you can make as many as you wish. Give it a look, it managed to make me a few thousand within a few days time and it can do the same for you.

About Me

This blog is about discovering all of the ways to make money in Rift. There are no cheats, hacks, or exploits used in any of my methods.
After amassing a 2 million gold fortune in wow I decided to come over to Rift and see how well I can do there. It is my belief that the game does not matter as much as the methods used and mine have already been proven to work and work well.